News

The Urban Flows Observatory has developed a unique vehicle-based platform for measuring the multiple factors affecting and influencing the quality of the environment Sheffield inhabitants experience. The MOBIle Urban Sensing vehicle, ‘MOBIUS’, will be making its first appearance on the city’s streets this summer. Based on a Nissan eNV200 van, MOBIUS is fully electric and uses additional on-board battery systems to power the installed equipment. This means no fossil fuels are used as it moves around the city collecting data. [...]

Air Quality has become a growing environmental concern in large urban areas around the world, causing various environmental and health problems. The sources and composition of air pollutants may vary from region to region, however, road traffic is considered the major emission source of air pollution in large urban areas in the UK and elsewhere. In Sheffield, the most concerning air pollutants are nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter such as PM10 and PM2.5, which indicate particle size with aerodynamic [...]

What if we could actually figure out how to make our cities places where everyone can thrive within the ability of our planet to sustain them? To achieve this we need to get better at making decisions about our cities and how we live in them. To help do this, we’re building the Sheffield Urban Flows Observatory, to gather and analyse city data. We’ve received £2.4m of funding and the assembly of the equipment and sensor networks is one year [...]

The Urban Flows Observatory would like to give YOU the opportunity to help us learn more about the cities we live in. Cities contain loads of useful information about various things including air quality, pollution, energy and resources. We’re giving away a whopping £4,000 worth of equipment to help you to create, build and test a model that will help us to understand and collect information in these areas so that we can learn more about our surroundings and how [...]

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Upcoming Events

Past Events

The week commencing Monday 15th October marks the start of the University of Sheffield’s Sustainability Week. Each day will see a different talk about how the University is using their power as a research-led university to tackle interlinked social, environmental and economic challenges through ambitious, interdisciplinary thinking.

As part of this we are delivering a ‘Sustainability in the Pub’ talk at the University Arms on Friday 19th October starting at 17:30 where the team will explain what we’re measuring and why, so together we can create healthy, happy cities.

Air quality monitoring sensors will be deployed around the city, aiming to collect both spatial and temporal high-resolution Air Quality data. We now have the backend data storage and visualisation software and hardware up and running so we want to now turn our attention to the deployment strategy. The sensors will be measuring various air pollutants and meteorological parameters. The first phase of the sensors will be deployed soon around the University of Sheffield. Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the sensors will be deployed in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

The objective of the workshop is to seek your input to the deployment strategy for the AQSN, in terms of what we should measure and where we should measure it. At present the deployment strategy is planned to respond to the projects outlined in the attached note. This workshop will review these projects and establish other parameters which should influence the locations and technologies to be deployed.

Come and join us for the final pitching event of the Urban Flows Observatory #sensorbuild competition!

Over the past two months, our nine competition entrants have been building prototypes of sensors that can capture data about how energy and resources flow through the city of Sheffield. They now face our panel of experts for the final pitch event, where they will show their prototype, demonstrate how it will capture data, and present how it could be scaled across the city. For the advanced stream entrants, we will also hear how their product could be commercialised.

Our winners will receive a fantastic prize package including a £500 cash prize, support for commercialisation (advanced stream only), and the chance to see their sensors located in Sheffield.

Each pitch is 2 minutes long and judges have 5 minutes for Q&A. There’ll be an opportunity for you to meet the competition entrants and see their prototypes, as well as vote for your favourite in the Popular Vote category. We’ll be providing pizza and beer, with big thanks to our event sponsors, Arup.

Urban Flows will be on the road this summer at BlueDot Festival 2018! Join us and the Grantham Centre to find out how tracking flow through the festival site can help us understand how cities work. Try our Virtual Reality headsets, Thermal Cameras, and LIDAR mapping to develop your own real-time data and analysis of the Festival. See you there!